Search

The mining of Tweets to develop datasets on recent issues, global challenges, pandemics, virus outbreaks, emerging technologies, and trending matters has been of significant interest to the scientific community in the recent past, as such datasets serve as a rich data resource for the investigation of different research questions. Furthermore, the virus outbreaks of the past, such as COVID-19, Ebola, Zika virus, and flu, just to name a few, were associated with various works related to the analysis of the multimodal components of Tweets to infer the different characteristics of conversations on Twitter related to these respective outbreaks. The ongoing outbreak of the monkeypox virus, declared a Global Public Health Emergency (GPHE) by the World Health Organization (WHO), has resulted in a surge of conversations about this outbreak on Twitter, which is resulting in the generation of tremendous amounts of Big Data. There has been no prior work in this field thus far that has focused on mining such conversations to develop a Twitter dataset. Furthermore, no prior work has focused on performing a comprehensive analysis of Tweets about this ongoing outbreak. To address these challenges, this work makes three scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents an open-access dataset of 556,427 Tweets about monkeypox that have been posted on Twitter since the first detected case of this outbreak. A comparative study is also presented that compares this dataset with 36 prior works in this field that focused on the development of Twitter datasets to further uphold the novelty, relevance, and usefulness of this dataset. Second, the paper reports the results of a comprehensive analysis of the Tweets of this dataset. This analysis presents several novel findings; for instance, out of all the 34 languages supported by Twitter, English has been the most used language to post Tweets about monkeypox, about 40,000 Tweets related to monkeypox were posted on the day WHO declared monkeypox as a GPHE, a total of 5470 distinct hashtags have been used on Twitter about this outbreak out of which #monkeypox is the most used hashtag, and Twitter for iPhone has been the leading source of Tweets about the outbreak. The sentiment analysis of the Tweets was also performed, and the results show that despite a lot of discussions, debate, opinions, information, and misinformation, on Twitter on various topics in this regard, such as monkeypox and the LGBTQI+ community, monkeypox and COVID-19, vaccines for monkeypox, etc., "neutral" sentiment was present in most of the Tweets. It was followed by "negative" and "positive" sentiments, respectively. Finally, to support research and development in this field, the paper presents a list of 50 open research questions related to the outbreak in the areas of Big Data, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning that may be investigated based on this dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive reach of social media like the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, offers unique opportunities for real-time analysis of cyberattack developments. By parsing and classifying tweets related to cyberattacks, we can glean valuable insights into their type, location, impact, and potential mitigation strategies. However, with millions of daily tweets, manual analysis is inefficient and time-consuming. This paper proposes an interactive and automated dashboard powered by natural language processing to effectively address this challenge. First, we created the CybAttT dataset, which contains 36,071 manually labeled English cyberattack tweets. We experimented with different classification algorithms. Following that, the best model was deployed and integrated into the streaming pipeline for real-time classification. This dynamic dashboard makes use of four different visualization formats: a geographical map, a data table, informative tiles, and a bar chart. Users can readily access crucial information about attacks, including location, timing, and perpetrators, enabling a swift response and mitigation efforts. Our experimental results demonstrated the dashboard's promising visualization capabilities, highlighting its potential as a valuable tool for organizations and individuals seeking an intuitive and comprehensive overview of cyberattack events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental illness is increasingly recognized as a substantial public health challenge worldwide. With the advent of social media, these platforms have become pivotal for individuals to express their emotions, thoughts, and experiences, thereby serving as a rich resource for mental health research. This paper is devoted to the creation of a comprehensive dataset and an innovative data annotation methodology to explore the underlying causes of these mental health issues. Our approach included the extraction of over one million Reddit posts from five different subreddits, spanning the pre-pandemic, during-pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. These posts were methodically annotated using a set of specific criteria, aimed at identifying various root causes. This rigorous process produced a richly categorized dataset, invaluable for detailed analysis. The complete unlabelled dataset, along with a subset that has been expertly annotated, is prepared for public release, as outlined in the data availability section. This dataset is a critical resource for training and fine-tuning machine learning models to identify the foundational triggers of individual mental health issues, offering valuable insights for practical interventions and future research in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid growth of social media platforms and online news consumption, the proliferation of fake news has emerged as a pressing concern. Detecting and combating fake news has become crucial in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of information disseminated through social media. Machine learning plays a crucial role in fake news detection due to its ability to analyze large amounts of data and identify patterns and trends that are indicative of misinformation. Fake news detection involves analyzing various types of data, such as textual or media content, social context, and network structure. Machine learning techniques enable automated and scalable detection of fake news, which is essential given the vast volume of information shared on social media platforms. Overall, machine learning provides a powerful tool for detecting and preventing the spread of fake news on social media. This review article provides an extensive analysis of recent advancements in fake news detection. The chosen articles cover a wide range of approaches, including data mining, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), ensemble learning, transfer learning, and graph-based techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment analysis is a critical subfield of natural language processing that focuses on categorizing text into three primary sentiments: positive, negative, and neutral. With the proliferation of online platforms where individuals can openly express their opinions and perspectives, it has become increasingly crucial for organizations to comprehend the underlying sentiments behind these opinions to make informed decisions. By comprehending the sentiments behind customers' opinions and attitudes towards products and services, companies can improve customer satisfaction, increase brand reputation, and ultimately increase revenue. Additionally, sentiment analysis can be applied to political analysis to understand public opinion toward political parties, candidates, and policies. Sentiment analysis can also be used in the financial industry to analyze news articles and social media posts to predict stock prices and identify potential investment opportunities. This paper offers an overview of the latest advancements in sentiment analysis, including preprocessing techniques, feature extraction methods, classification techniques, widely used datasets, and experimental results. Furthermore, this paper delves into the challenges posed by sentiment analysis datasets and discusses some limitations and future research prospects of sentiment analysis. Given the importance of sentiment analysis, this paper provides valuable insights into the current state of the field and serves as a valuable resource for both researchers and practitioners. The information presented in this paper can inform stakeholders about the latest advancements in sentiment analysis and guide future research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the consumption of social media content to keep up with global news and to verify its authenticity has become a considerable challenge. Social media enables us to easily access news anywhere, anytime, but it also gives rise to the spread of fake news, thereby delivering false information. This also has a negative impact on society. Therefore, it is necessary to determine whether or not news spreading over social media is real. This will allow for confusion among social media users to be avoided, and it is important in ensuring positive social development. This paper proposes a novel solution by detecting the authenticity of news through natural language processing techniques. Specifically, this paper proposes a novel scheme comprising three steps, namely, stance detection, author credibility verification, and machine learning-based classification, to verify the authenticity of news. In the last stage of the proposed pipeline, several machine learning techniques are applied, such as decision trees, random forest, logistic regression, and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms. For this study, the fake news dataset was taken from Kaggle. The experimental results show an accuracy of 93.15%, precision of 92.65%, recall of 95.71%, and F1-score of 94.15% for the support vector machine algorithm. The SVM is better than the second best classifier, i.e., logistic regression, by 6.82%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of social media has added to the channels of bullying for perpetrators. Unfortunately, cyberbullying (CB) is the most prevalent phenomenon in today's cyber world, and is a severe threat to the mental and physical health of citizens. This opens the need to develop a robust system to prevent bullying content from online forums, blogs, and social media platforms to manage the impact in our society. Several machine learning (ML) algorithms have been proposed for this purpose. However, their performances are not consistent due to high class imbalance and generalisation issues. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) like BERT and RoBERTa have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, the LLMs have not been applied extensively for CB detection. In our paper, we explored the use of these models for cyberbullying (CB) detection. We have prepared a new dataset (D2) from existing studies (Formspring and Twitter). Our experimental results for dataset D1 and D2 showed that RoBERTa outperformed other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptocurrencies are nowadays seen as an investment opportunity, since they show some peculiar features, such as high volatility and diversification properties, that are triggering research interest into investigating their differences with traditional assets. In our paper, we address the problem of predictability of cryptocurrency and stock trends by using data from social online communities and platforms to assess their contribution in terms of predictive power. We extend recent developments in the field by exploiting a combination of stochastic neural networks (NNs), an extension of standard NNs, natural language processing (NLP) to extract sentiment from Twitter, and an external evolutionary algorithm for optimal parameter setting to predict the short-term trend direction. Our results point to good and robust accuracy over time and across different market regimes. Furthermore, we propose to exploit recent advances in sentiment analysis to reassess its role in financial forecasting; in this way, we contribute to the empirical literature by showing that predictions based on sentiment analysis are not found to be significantly different from predictions based on historical data. Nonetheless, compared to stock markets, we find that the accuracy of trend predictions with sentiment analysis is on average much higher for cryptocurrencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the current shift in the mass media landscape from journalistic rigor to social media, personalized social media is becoming the new norm. Although the digitalization progress of the media brings many advantages, it also increases the risk of spreading disinformation, misinformation, and malformation through the use of fake news. The emergence of this harmful phenomenon has managed to polarize society and manipulate public opinion on particular topics, e.g., elections, vaccinations, etc. Such information propagated on social media can distort public perceptions and generate social unrest while lacking the rigor of traditional journalism. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques are essential for developing efficient tools that can detect fake news. Models that use the context of textual data are essential for resolving the fake news detection problem, as they manage to encode linguistic features within the vector representation of words. In this paper, we propose a new approach that uses document embeddings to build multiple models that accurately label news articles as reliable or fake. We also present a benchmark on different architectures that detect fake news using binary or multi-labeled classification. We evaluated the models on five large news corpora using accuracy, precision, and recall. We obtained better results than more complex state-of-the-art Deep Neural Network models. We observe that the most important factor for obtaining high accuracy is the document encoding, not the classification model's complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Social Media (OSM) like Facebook and Twitter has emerged as a powerful tool to express via text people's opinions and feelings about the current surrounding events. Understanding the emotions at the fine-grained level of these expressed thoughts is important for system improvement. Such crucial insights cannot be completely obtained by doing AI-based big data sentiment analysis; hence, text-based emotion detection using AI in social media big data has become an upcoming area of Natural Language Processing research. It can be used in various fields such as understanding expressed emotions, human-computer interaction, data mining, online education, recommendation systems, and psychology. Even though the research work is ongoing in this domain, it still lacks a formal study that can give a qualitative (techniques used) and quantitative (contributions) literature overview. This study has considered 827 Scopus and 83 Web of Science research papers from the years 2005-2020 for the analysis. The qualitative review represents different emotion models, datasets, algorithms, and application domains of text-based emotion detection. The quantitative bibliometric review of contributions presents research details such as publications, volume, co-authorship networks, citation analysis, and demographic research distribution. In the end, challenges and probable solutions are showcased, which can provide future research directions in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increased popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, sentiment analysis (SA) over the microblogging content becomes of crucial importance. The literature reports good results for well-resourced languages such as English, Spanish or German, but open research space still exists for underrepresented languages such as Romanian, where there is a lack of public training datasets or pretrained word embeddings. The majority of research on Romanian SA tackles the issue in a binary classification manner (positive vs. negative), using a single public dataset which consists of product reviews. In this paper, we respond to the need for a media surveillance project to possess a custom multinomial SA classifier for usage in a restrictive and specific production setup. We describe in detail how such a classifier was built, with the help of an English dataset (containing around 15 , 000 tweets) translated to Romanian with a public translation service. We test the most popular classification methods that could be applied to SA, including standard machine learning, deep learning and BERT. As we could not find any results for multinomial sentiment classification (positive, negative and neutral) in Romanian, we set two benchmark accuracies of ≈78% using standard machine learning and ≈81% using BERT. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the automatic translation service does not downgrade the learning performance by comparing the accuracies achieved by the models trained on the original dataset with the models trained on the translated data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human needs consist of five levels, which are: physiological needs, safety needs, love needs, esteem needs and self-actualization. All these needs lead to human behavior. If the environment of a person is positive, healthy behavior is developed. However, if the environment of the person is not healthy, it can be reflected in his/her behavior. Machines are intelligent enough to mimic human intelligence by using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. In the modern era, people tend to post their everyday life events on social media in the form of comments, pictures, videos, etc. Therefore, social media is a significant way of knowing certain behaviors of people such as abusive, aggressive, frustrated and offensive behaviors. Behavior detection by crawling the social media profile of a person is a crucial and important idea. The challenge of behavior detection can be sorted out by applying social media forensics on social media profiles, which involves NLP and deep learning techniques. This paper is based on the study of state of the art work on behavior detection, and based on the research, a model is proposed for behavior detection. The proposed model outperformed with an F1 score of 87% in the unigram + bigram class, and in the bigram + trigram class, it gave an F1 score of 88% when compared with models applied on state of the art work. This study is a great benefit to cybercrime and cyber-security agencies in shortlisting the profiles containing certain behaviors to prevent crimes in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do employees with high ethical and moral values perform better? Comparing personality characteristics, moral values, and risk-taking behavior with individual and team performance has long been researched. Until now, these determinants of individual personality have been measured through surveys. However, individuals are notoriously bad at self-assessment. Combining machine learning (ML) with social network analysis (SNA) and natural language processing (NLP), this research draws on email conversations to predict the personal values of individuals. These values are then compared with the individual and team performance of employees. This prediction builds on a two-layered ML model. Building on features of social network structure, network dynamics, and network content derived from email conversations, we predict personality characteristics, moral values, and the risk-taking behavior of employees. In turn, we use these values to predict individual and team performance. Our results indicate that more conscientious and less extroverted team members increase the performance of their teams. Willingness to take social risks decreases the performance of innovation teams in a healthcare environment. Similarly, a focus on values such as power and self-enhancement increases the team performance of a global services provider. In sum, the contributions of this paper are twofold: it first introduces a novel approach to measuring personal values based on "honest signals" in emails. Second, these values are then used to build better teams by identifying ideal personality characteristics for a chosen task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: Results of this work can be applied to anti-rumor microblog recommendation decisions for social media platforms, in order to reduce the impact of rumors by promoting the spread of the truth. One prominent dark side of online information behavior is the spreading of rumors. The feature analysis and crowd identification of social media rumor refuters based on machine learning methods can shed light on the rumor refutation process. This paper analyzed the association between user features and rumor refuting behavior in five main rumor categories: economics, society, disaster, politics, and military. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques are applied to quantify the user's sentiment tendency and recent interests. Then, those results were combined with other personalized features to train an XGBoost classification model, and potential refuters can be identified. Information from 58,807 Sina Weibo users (including their 646,877 microblogs) for the five anti-rumor microblog categories was collected for model training and feature analysis. The results revealed that there were significant differences between rumor stiflers and refuters, as well as between refuters for different categories. Refuters tended to be more active on social media and a large proportion of them gathered in more developed regions. Tweeting history was a vital reference as well, and refuters showed higher interest in topics related with the rumor refuting message. Meanwhile, features such as gender, age, user labels and sentiment tendency also varied between refuters considering categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment analysis (SA) has been an active research subject in the domain of natural language processing due to its important functions in interpreting people's perspectives and drawing successful opinion-based judgments. On social media, Roman Urdu is one of the most extensively utilized dialects. Sentiment analysis of Roman Urdu is difficult due to its morphological complexities and varied dialects. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of various word embeddings for Roman Urdu and English dialects using the CNN-LSTM architecture with traditional machine learning classifiers. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture for Roman Urdu and English dialect SA based on two layers: LSTM for long-term dependency preservation and a one-layer CNN model for local feature extraction. To obtain the final classification, the feature maps learned by CNN and LSTM are fed to several machine learning classifiers. Various word embedding models support this concept. Extensive tests on four corpora show that the proposed model performs exceptionally well in Roman Urdu and English text sentiment classification, with an accuracy of 0.904, 0.841, 0.740, and 0.748 against MDPI, RUSA, RUSA-19, and UCL datasets, respectively. The results show that the SVM classifier and the Word2Vec CBOW (Continuous Bag of Words) model are more beneficial options for Roman Urdu sentiment analysis, but that BERT word embedding, two-layer LSTM, and SVM as a classifier function are more suitable options for English language sentiment analysis. The suggested model outperforms existing well-known advanced models on relevant corpora, improving the accuracy by up to 5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities increasingly leverage social media platforms, especially Twitter, for news dissemination, audience engagement, and feedback collection. King Faisal University (KFU) is dedicated to enhancing its institutional identity (ID), grounded in environmental sustainability and food security, encompassing nine critical areas. This study aims to assess the impact of KFU's Twitter interactions on public awareness of its institutional identity using systematic analysis and machine learning (ML) methods. The objectives are to: (1) Determine the influence of KFU's Twitter presence on ID awareness; (2) create a dedicated dataset for real-time public interaction analysis with KFU's Twitter content; (3) investigate Twitter's role in promoting KFU's institutional identity across 9-ID domains and its changing impact over time; (4) utilize k-means clustering and sentiment analysis (TFIDF and Word2vec) to classify data and assess similarities among the identity domains; and (5) apply the categorization method to process and categorize tweets, facilitating the assessment of word meanings and similarities of the 9-ID domains. The study also employs four ML models, including Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), with the Random Forest (RF) model combined with Word2vec achieving the highest accuracy of 100%. The findings underscore the value of KFU's Twitter data analysis in deepening the understanding of its ID and guiding the development of effective communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms and online gaming sites play a pervasive role in facilitating peer interaction and social development for adolescents, but they also pose potential threats to health and safety. It is crucial to tackle cyberbullying issues within these platforms to ensure the healthy social development of adolescents. Cyberbullying has been linked to adverse mental health outcomes among adolescents, including anxiety, depression, academic underperformance, and an increased risk of suicide. While cyberbullying is a concern for all adolescents, those with disabilities are particularly susceptible and face a higher risk of being targets of cyberbullying. Our research addresses these challenges by introducing a personalized online virtual companion guided by artificial intelligence (AI). The web-based virtual companion's interactions aim to assist adolescents in detecting cyberbullying. More specifically, an adolescent with ASD watches a cyberbullying scenario in a virtual environment, and the AI virtual companion then asks the adolescent if he/she detected cyberbullying. To inform the virtual companion in real time to know if the adolescent has learned about detecting cyberbullying, we have implemented fast and lightweight cyberbullying detection models employing the T5-small and MobileBERT networks. Our experimental results show that we obtain comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods despite having a compact architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the widespread use of social media and easy access to the Internet have brought about a significant transformation in the type of textual data available on the Web. This change is particularly evident in Arabic language usage, as the growing number of users from diverse domains has led to a considerable influx of Arabic text in various dialects, each characterized by differences in morphology, syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Consequently, researchers in language recognition and natural language processing have become increasingly interested in identifying Arabic dialects. Numerous methods have been proposed to recognize this informal data, owing to its crucial implications for several applications, such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, text summarization, and machine translation. However, Arabic dialect identification is a significant challenge due to the vast diversity of the Arabic language in its dialects. This study introduces a novel hybrid machine and deep learning model, incorporating an attention mechanism for detecting and classifying Arabic dialects. Several experiments were conducted using a novel dataset that collected information from user-generated comments from Twitter of Arabic dialects, namely, Egyptian, Gulf, Jordanian, and Yemeni, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The dataset comprises 34,905 rows extracted from Twitter, representing an unbalanced data distribution. The data annotation was performed by native speakers proficient in each dialect. The results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the performance of long short-term memory, bidirectional long short-term memory, and logistic regression models in dialect classification using different word representations as follows: term frequency-inverse document frequency, Word2Vec, and global vector for word representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of the internet, especially on social media platforms, has amplified the prevalence of cyberbullying and harassment. Addressing this issue involves harnessing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques for the automatic detection of harmful content. However, these methods encounter challenges when applied to low-resource languages like the Chittagonian dialect of Bangla. This study compares two approaches for identifying offensive language containing vulgar remarks in Chittagonian. The first relies on basic keyword matching, while the second employs machine learning and deep learning techniques. The keyword-matching approach involves scanning the text for vulgar words using a predefined lexicon. Despite its simplicity, this method establishes a strong foundation for more sophisticated ML and deep learning approaches. An issue with this approach is the need for constant updates to the lexicon. To address this, we propose an automatic method for extracting vulgar words from linguistic data, achieving near-human performance and ensuring adaptability to evolving vulgar language. Insights from the keyword-matching method inform the optimization of machine learning and deep learning-based techniques. These methods initially train models to identify vulgar context using patterns and linguistic features from labeled datasets. Our dataset, comprising social media posts, comments, and forum discussions from Facebook, is thoroughly detailed for future reference in similar studies. The results indicate that while keyword matching provides reasonable results, it struggles to capture nuanced variations and phrases in specific vulgar contexts, rendering it less robust for practical use. This contradicts the assumption that vulgarity solely relies on specific vulgar words. In contrast, methods based on deep learning and machine learning excel in identifying deeper linguistic patterns. Comparing SimpleRNN models using Word2Vec and fastText embeddings, which achieved accuracies ranging from 0.84 to 0.90, logistic regression (LR) demonstrated remarkable accuracy at 0.91. This highlights a common issue with neural network-based algorithms, namely, that they typically require larger datasets for adequate generalization and competitive performance compared to conventional approaches like LR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last fifteen years, an immense expansion has been witnessed in mobile app usage and production. The intense competition in the tech sector and also the rapidly and constantly evolving user requirements have led to increased burden on mobile app creators. Nowadays, fulfilling users' expectations cannot be readily achieved and new and unconventional approaches are needed to permit an interested crowd of users to contribute in the introduction of creative mobile apps. Indeed, users and developers of mobile apps are the most influential candidates to engage in any of the requirements engineering activities. The place where both can best be found is on Twitter, one of the most widely used social media platforms. More interestingly, Twitter is considered as a fertile ground for textual content generated by the crowd that can assist in building robust predictive classification models using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Therefore, in this study, we have built two classification models that can identify mobile apps users and developers using tweets. A thorough empirical comparison of different feature extraction techniques and machine learning classification algorithms were experimented with to find the best-performing mobile app user and developer classifiers. The results revealed that for mobile app user classification, the highest accuracy achieved was ≈0.86, produced via logistic regression (LR) using Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) with N-gram (unigram, bigram and trigram), and the highest precision was ≈0.86, produced via LR using Bag-of-Words (BOW) with N-gram (unigram and bigram). On the other hand, for mobile app developer classification, the highest accuracy achieved was ≈0.87, produced by random forest (RF) using BOW with N-gram (unigram and bigram), and the highest precision was ≈0.88, produced by multi-layer perception neural network (MLP NN) using BERTweet for feature extraction. According to the results, we believe that the developed classification models are efficient and can assist in identifying mobile app users and developers from tweets. Moreover, we envision that our models can be harnessed as a crowd selection approach for crowdsourcing requirements engineering activities to enhance and design inventive and satisfying mobile apps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic accident detection is an important strategy governments can use to implement policies intended to reduce accidents. They usually use techniques such as image processing, RFID devices, among others. Social network mining has emerged as a low-cost alternative. However, social networks come with several challenges such as informal language and misspellings. This paper proposes a method to extract traffic accident data from Twitter in Spanish. The method consists of four phases. The first phase establishes the data collection mechanisms. The second consists of vectorially representing the messages and classifying them as accidents or non-accidents. The third phase uses named entity recognition techniques to detect the location. In the fourth phase, locations pass through a geocoder that returns their geographic coordinates. This method was applied to Bogota city and the data on Twitter were compared with the official traffic information source; comparisons showed some influence of Twitter on the commercial and industrial area of the city. The results reveal how effective the information on accidents reported on Twitter can be. It should therefore be considered as a source of information that may complement existing detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme weather events, such as flooding, are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. Therefore, the prediction of extreme weather events, assessment of their local impacts in urban environments, and implementation of adaptation measures are becoming high-priority challenges for local, regional, and national agencies and authorities. To manage these challenges, access to accurate weather warnings and information about the occurrence, extent, and impacts of extreme weather events are crucial. As a result, in addition to official sources of information for prediction and monitoring, citizen volunteered geographic information (VGI) has emerged as a complementary source of valuable information. In this work, we propose the formulation of an approach to complement the impact-based weather warning system that has been introduced in Sweden in 2021 by making use of such alternative sources of data. We present and discuss design considerations and opportunities towards the creation of a visual analytics (VA) pipeline for the identification and exploration of extreme weather events and their impacts from VGI texts and images retrieved from social media. The envisioned VA pipeline incorporates three main steps: (1) data collection, (2) image/text classification and analysis, and (3) visualization and exploration through an interactive visual interface. We envision that our work has the potential to support three processes that involve multiple stakeholders of the weather warning system: (1) the validation of previously issued warnings, (2) local and regional assessment-support documentation, and (3) the monitoring of ongoing events. The results of this work could thus generate information that is relevant to climate adaptation decision making and provide potential support for the future development of national weather warning systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different social media platforms have become increasingly popular in the Arab world in recent years. The increasing use of social media, however, has also led to the emergence of a new challenge in the form of abusive content, including hate speech, offensive language, and abusive language. Existing research work focuses on automatic abusive content detection as a binary classification problem. In addition, the existing research work on the automatic detection task surrounding abusive Arabic content fails to tackle the dialect-specific phenomenon. Consequently, this has led to two important issues in the automatic abusive Arabic content detection task. In this study, we used a multi-aspect annotation schema to tackle the automatic abusive content detection problem in Arabic countries, based on the multi-class classification task and the dialectal Arabic (DA)-specific phenomenon. More precisely, the multi-aspect annotation schema includes five attributes: directness, hostility, target, group, and annotator. We specifically developed a framework to automatically detecting abusive content on Twitter using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The developed framework used different models of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and pretrained Arabic language models (LMs) using the multi-aspect annotation dataset. In addition, to investigate the impact of the other approaches, such as multi-task learning (MTL), we developed four MTL models built on top of a pretrained DA language model (called MARBERT) and trained on the multi-aspect annotation dataset. Our MTL models and pretrained Arabic LMs enhanced the performance compared to the existing DL model mentioned in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the area of financial forecasting has attracted high interest due to the emergence of huge data volumes (big data) and the advent of more powerful modeling techniques such as deep learning. To generate the financial forecasts, systems are developed that combine methods from various scientific fields, such as information retrieval, natural language processing and deep learning. In this paper, we present ASPENDYS, a supportive platform for investors that combines various methods from the aforementioned scientific fields aiming to facilitate the management and the decision making of investment actions through personalized recommendations. To accomplish that, the system takes into account both financial data and textual data from news websites and the social networks Twitter and Stocktwits. The financial data are processed using methods of technical analysis and machine learning, while the textual data are analyzed regarding their reliability and then their sentiments towards an investment. As an outcome, investment signals are generated based on the financial data analysis and the sensing of the general sentiment towards a certain investment and are finally recommended to the investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text classification is a prominent research area, gaining more interest in academia, industry and social media. Arabic is one of the world's most famous languages and it had a significant role in science, mathematics and philosophy in Europe in the middle ages. During the Arab Spring, social media, that is, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, played an essential role in establishing, running, and spreading these movements. Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) and Arabic Text Classification (ATC) for these social media tools are hot topics, aiming to obtain valuable Arabic text insights. Although some surveys are available on this topic, the studies and research on Arabic Tweets need to be classified on the basis of machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms and lexicon-based classifications are considered essential tools for text processing. In this paper, a comparison of previous surveys is presented, elaborating the need for a comprehensive study on Arabic Tweets. Research studies are classified according to machine learning algorithms, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, hybrid, and lexicon-based classifications, and their advantages/disadvantages are discussed comprehensively. We pose different challenges and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model's performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public acceptance and support for renewable energy are important determinants of the low-carbon energy transition. This paper examines public sentiment toward solar energy in the United States using data from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform on which people post messages, known as tweets. We filtered tweets specific to solar energy and performed a classification task using Robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (RoBERTa). Our RoBERTa-based sentiment classification model, fine-tuned with 6300 manually annotated tweets specific to solar energy, attains 80.2% accuracy for ternary (positive, neutral, or negative) classification. Analyzing 266,686 tweets during the period of January to December 2020, we find public sentiment varies widely across states (Coefficient of Variation = 164.66 % ). Within the study period, the Northeast U.S. region shows more positive sentiment toward solar energy than did the South U.S. region. Public opinion on solar energy is more positive in states with a larger share of Democratic voters in the 2020 presidential election. Public sentiment toward solar energy is more positive in states with consumer-friendly net metering policies and a more mature solar market. States that wish to gain public support for solar energy might want to consider implementing consumer-friendly net metering policies and support the growth of solar businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the rapid spread of large volumes of online information among an increasing number of social network users is observed. It is a phenomenon that has often been exploited by malicious users and entities, which forge, distribute, and reproduce fake news and propaganda. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the automatic detection of fake news on Twitter that involves (a) pairwise text input, (b) a novel deep neural network learning architecture that allows for flexible input fusion at various network layers, and (c) various input modes, like word embeddings and both linguistic and network account features. Furthermore, tweets are innovatively separated into news headers and news text, and an extensive experimental setup performs classification tests using both. Our main results show high overall accuracy performance in fake news detection. The proposed deep learning architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art classifiers, while using fewer features and embeddings from the tweet text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging platforms, has tens of millions of active users worldwide, generating hundreds of millions of posts every day. Twitter posts, referred to as "tweets", the short and the noisy text, bring many challenges with them, such as in the case of some emergency or disaster. Predicting the location of these tweets is important for social, security, human rights, and business reasons and has raised noteworthy consideration lately. However, most Twitter users disable the geo-tagging feature, and their home locations are neither standardized nor accurate. In this study, we applied four machine learning techniques named Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Multinomial Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machine with and without the utilization of the geo-distance matrix for location prediction of a tweet using its textual content. Our extensive experiments on our vast collection of Arabic tweets From Saudi Arabia with different feature sets yielded promising results with 67% accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms have become a substratum for people to enunciate their opinions and ideas across the globe. Due to anonymity preservation and freedom of expression, it is possible to humiliate individuals and groups, disregarding social etiquette online, inevitably proliferating and diversifying the incidents of cyberbullying and cyber hate speech. This intimidating problem has recently sought the attention of researchers and scholars worldwide. Still, the current practices to sift the online content and offset the hatred spread do not go far enough. One factor contributing to this is the recent prevalence of regional languages in social media, the dearth of language resources, and flexible detection approaches, specifically for low-resource languages. In this context, most existing studies are oriented towards traditional resource-rich languages and highlight a huge gap in recently embraced resource-poor languages. One such language currently adopted worldwide and more typically by South Asian users for textual communication on social networks is Roman Urdu. It is derived from Urdu and written using a Left-to-Right pattern and Roman scripting. This language elicits numerous computational challenges while performing natural language preprocessing tasks due to its inflections, derivations, lexical variations, and morphological richness. To alleviate this problem, this research proposes a cyberbullying detection approach for analyzing textual data in the Roman Urdu language based on advanced preprocessing methods, voting-based ensemble techniques, and machine learning algorithms. The study has extracted a vast number of features, including statistical features, word N-Grams, combined n-grams, and BOW model with TFIDF weighting in different experimental settings using GridSearchCV and cross-validation techniques. The detection approach has been designed to tackle users' textual input by considering user-specific writing styles on social media in a colloquial and non-standard form. The experimental results show that SVM with embedded hybrid N-gram features produced the highest average accuracy of around 83%. Among the ensemble voting-based techniques, XGboost achieved the optimal accuracy of 79%. Both implicit and explicit Roman Urdu instances were evaluated, and the categorization of severity based on prediction probabilities was performed. Time complexity is also analyzed in terms of execution time, indicating that LR, using different parameters and feature combinations, is the fastest algorithm. The results are promising with respect to standard assessment metrics and indicate the feasibility of the proposed approach in cyberbullying detection for the Roman Urdu language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University towns face many challenges in the 21st century due to urbanization, increased student population, and higher educational institutions' inability to house all their students on-campus. For university towns to be resilient and sustainable, the challenges facing them must be assessed and addressed. To carry out community resilience assessments, this study adopted a novel methodological framework to harness the power of artificial intelligence and social media big data (user-generated content on Twitter) to carry out remote studies in six university towns on six continents using Text Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. Cultural, social, physical, economic, and institutional and governance community challenges were identified and analyzed from the historical big data and validated using an online expert survey. This study gives a global overview of the challenges university towns experience due to studentification and shows that artificial intelligence can provide an easy, cheap, and more accurate way of conducting community resilience assessments in urban communities. The study also contributes to knowledge of research in the new normal by proving that longitudinal studies can be completed remotely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion detection (ED) and sentiment analysis (SA) play a vital role in identifying an individual's level of interest in any given field. Humans use facial expressions, voice pitch, gestures, and words to convey their emotions. Emotion detection and sentiment analysis in English and Chinese have received much attention in the last decade. Still, poor-resource languages such as Urdu have been mostly disregarded, which is the primary focus of this research. Roman Urdu should also be investigated like other languages because social media platforms are frequently used for communication. Roman Urdu faces a significant challenge in the absence of corpus for emotion detection and sentiment analysis because linguistic resources are vital for natural language processing. In this study, we create a corpus of 1021 sentences for emotion detection and 20,251 sentences for sentiment analysis, both obtained from various areas, and annotate it with the aid of human annotators from six and three classes, respectively. In order to train large-scale unlabeled data, the bag-of-word, term frequency-inverse document frequency, and Skip-gram models are employed, and the learned word vector is then fed into the CNN-LSTM model. In addition to our proposed approach, we also use other fundamental algorithms, including a convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, artificial neural networks, and recurrent neural networks for comparison. The result indicates that the CNN-LSTM proposed method paired with Word2Vec is more effective than other approaches regarding emotion detection and evaluating sentiment analysis in Roman Urdu. Furthermore, we compare our based model with some previous work. Both emotion detection and sentiment analysis have seen significant improvements, jumping from an accuracy of 85% to 95% and from 89% to 93.3%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-learning is a popular area in terms of learning from social media websites in various terms and contents for every group of people in this world with different knowledge backgrounds and jobs. E-learning sites help users such as students, business workers, instructors, and those searching for different educational institutions. Excluding the benefits of this system, there are various challenges that the users face in online platforms. One of the important challenges is the true information and right content based on these resources, search results and quality. This research proposes virtual and intelligent agent-based recommendation, which requires users' profile information and preferences to recommend the proper content and search results based on their search history. We applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and semantic analysis approaches for the recommendation of course selection to e-learners and tutors. Moreover, machine learning performance analysis applied to improve the user rating results in the e-learning environment. The system automatically learns and analyzes the learner characteristics and processes the learning style through the clustering strategy. Compared with the recent state-of-the-art in this field, the proposed system and the simulation results show the minimizing number of metric errors compared to other works. The achievements of the presented approach are providing a comfortable platform to the user for course selection and recommendations. Similarly, we avoid recommending the same contents and courses. We analyze the user preferences and improving the recommendation system performance to provide highly related content based on the user profile situation. The prediction accuracy of the proposed system is 98% compared to hybrid filtering, self organization systems and ensemble modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to provide insights into the COVID-19-related communication on Twitter in the Republic of Croatia. For that purpose, we developed an NL-based framework that enables automatic analysis of a large dataset of tweets in the Croatian language. We collected and analysed 206,196 tweets related to COVID-19 and constructed a dataset of 10,000 tweets which we manually annotated with a sentiment label. We trained the Cro-CoV-cseBERT language model for the representation and clustering of tweets. Additionally, we compared the performance of four machine learning algorithms on the task of sentiment classification. After identifying the best performing setup of NLP methods, we applied the proposed framework in the task of characterisation of COVID-19 tweets in Croatia. More precisely, we performed sentiment analysis and tracked the sentiment over time. Furthermore, we detected how tweets are grouped into clusters with similar themes across three pandemic waves. Additionally, we characterised the tweets by analysing the distribution of sentiment polarity (in each thematic cluster and over time) and the number of retweets (in each thematic cluster and sentiment class). These results could be useful for additional research and interpretation in the domains of sociology, psychology or other sciences, as well as for the authorities, who could use them to address crisis communication problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the closure of educational institutes leads to an unprecedented rise in online learning. For limiting the impact of COVID-19 and obstructing its widespread, educational institutions closed their campuses immediately and academic activities are moved to e-learning platforms. The effectiveness of e-learning is a critical concern for both students and parents, specifically in terms of its suitability to students and teachers and its technical feasibility with respect to different social scenarios. Such concerns must be reviewed from several aspects before e-learning can be adopted at such a larger scale. This study endeavors to investigate the effectiveness of e-learning by analyzing the sentiments of people about e-learning. Due to the rise of social media as an important mode of communication recently, people's views can be found on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. This study uses a Twitter dataset containing 17,155 tweets about e-learning. Machine learning and deep learning approaches have shown their suitability, capability, and potential for image processing, object detection, and natural language processing tasks and text analysis is no exception. Machine learning approaches have been largely used both for annotation and text and sentiment analysis. Keeping in view the adequacy and efficacy of machine learning models, this study adopts TextBlob, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning), and SentiWordNet to analyze the polarity and subjectivity score of tweets' text. Furthermore, bearing in mind the fact that machine learning models display high classification accuracy, various machine learning models have been used for sentiment classification. Two feature extraction techniques, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and BoW (Bag of Words) have been used to effectively build and evaluate the models. All the models have been evaluated in terms of various important performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The results reveal that the random forest and support vector machine classifier achieve the highest accuracy of 0.95 when used with Bow features. Performance comparison is carried out for results of TextBlob, VADER, and SentiWordNet, as well as classification results of machine learning models and deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short Term Memory), CNN-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional-LSTM). Additionally, topic modeling is performed to find the problems associated with e-learning which indicates that uncertainty of campus opening date, children's disabilities to grasp online education, and lagging efficient networks for online education are the top three problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the recent pandemic of COVID-19, an increasing amount of information has been propagated on social media. This situational information is valuable for public authorities. Therefore, this study characterized the propagation scale of situational information types by harnessing the power of natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms. We observed that the length of the post has a positive correlation with type 1 information (announcements), and negative words were mostly used in type 5 information (criticizing the government), whereas anxiety-related words have a negative effect on the amount of retweeted type 0 (precautions) and type 2 (donations) information. This type of research study not only contributes to the situational information literature by comprehensively defining categories but also provides data-oriented practical insights into information so that management authorities can formulate response strategies after the pandemic. Our approach is one of its kind and combines Twitter content features, user features and LIWC linguistic features with machine learning algorithms to analyze the propagation scale of situational information, and it achieved 77% accuracy with SVM while classifying the information categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing keyword-based search techniques suffer from limitations owing to unknown, mismatched, and obscure vocabulary. These challenges are particularly prevalent in social media, where slang, jargon, and memetics are abundant. We develop a new technique, Archetype-Based Modeling and Search, that can mitigate these challenges as they are encountered in social media. This technique learns to identify new relevant documents based on a specified set of archetypes from which both vocabulary and relevance information are extracted. We present a case study from the social media data from Reddit, by using authors from/r/Opiates to characterize discourse around opioid use and to find additional relevant authors on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authorship attribution is one of the important fields of natural language processing (NLP). Its popularity is due to the relevance of implementing solutions for information security, as well as copyright protection, various linguistic studies, in particular, researches of social networks. The article is a continuation of the series of studies aimed at the identification of the Russian-language text's author and reducing the required text volume. The focus of the study was aimed at the attribution of textual data created as a product of human online activity. The effectiveness of the models was evaluated on the two Russian-language datasets: literary texts and short comments from users of social networks. Classical machine learning (ML) algorithms, popular neural networks (NN) architectures, and their hybrids, including convolutional neural network (CNN), networks with long short-term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and fastText, that have not been used in previous studies, were applied to solve the problem. A particular experiment was devoted to the selection of informative features using genetic algorithms (GA) and evaluation of the classifier trained on the optimal feature space. Using fastText or a combination of support vector machine (SVM) with GA reduced the time costs by half in comparison with deep NNs with comparable accuracy. The average accuracy for literary texts was 80.4% using SVM combined with GA, 82.3% using deep NNs, and 82.1% using fastText. For social media comments, results were 66.3%, 73.2%, and 68.1%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. However, many cases of schizophrenia remain untreated due to failure to diagnose, self-denial, and social stigma. With the advent of social media, individuals suffering from schizophrenia share their mental health problems and seek support and treatment options. Machine learning approaches are increasingly used for detecting schizophrenia from social media posts. This study aims to determine whether machine learning could be effectively used to detect signs of schizophrenia in social media users by analyzing their social media texts. To this end, we collected posts from the social media platform Reddit focusing on schizophrenia, along with non-mental health related posts (fitness, jokes, meditation, parenting, relationships, and teaching) for the control group. We extracted linguistic features and content topics from the posts. Using supervised machine learning, we classified posts belonging to schizophrenia and interpreted important features to identify linguistic markers of schizophrenia. We applied unsupervised clustering to the features to uncover a coherent semantic representation of words in schizophrenia. We identified significant differences in linguistic features and topics including increased use of third person plural pronouns and negative emotion words and symptom-related topics. We distinguished schizophrenic from control posts with an accuracy of 96%. Finally, we found that coherent semantic groups of words were the key to detecting schizophrenia. Our findings suggest that machine learning approaches could help us understand the linguistic characteristics of schizophrenia and identify schizophrenia or otherwise at-risk individuals using social media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a global health emergency that has fundamentally altered human life. Public perception about COVID-19 greatly informs public policymaking and charts the course of present and future mitigation strategies. Existing approaches to gain insights into the evolving nature of public opinion has led to the application of natural language processing on public interaction data acquired from online surveys and social media. In this work, we apply supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches on global Twitter data to learn the opinions about adoption of mitigation strategies such as social distancing, masks, and vaccination, as well as the effect of socioeconomic, demographic, political, and epidemiological features on perceptions. Our study reveals the uniform polarity in public sentiment on the basis of spatial proximity or COVID-19 infection rates. We show the reservation about the adoption of social distancing and vaccination across the world and also quantify the influence of airport traffic, homelessness, followed by old age and race on sentiment of netizens within the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media services make it possible for an increasing number of people to express their opinion publicly. In this context, large amounts of hateful comments are published daily. The PHARM project aims at monitoring and modeling hate speech against refugees and migrants in Greece, Italy, and Spain. In this direction, a web interface for the creation and the query of a multi-source database containing hate speech-related content is implemented and evaluated. The selected sources include Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook comments and posts, as well as comments and articles from a selected list of websites. The interface allows users to search in the existing database, scrape social media using keywords, annotate records through a dedicated platform and contribute new content to the database. Furthermore, the functionality for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis of texts is provided, making use of novel methods and machine learning models. The interface can be accessed online with a graphical user interface compatible with modern internet browsers. For the evaluation of the interface, a multifactor questionnaire was formulated, targeting to record the users' opinions about the web interface and the corresponding functionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]